FREE TUITION? Tuition rates go up Sticker prices go down W I LL W E LLI N GTO N
A rush to set tuition rates Tuition fees at the University of Guelph are scheduled to rise once again in the fall of 2018. If it seems early to be thinking about next year’s finances, that’s because it is. Normally, tuition hikes, which are capped by the province, are decided in the spring, along with the rest of the University’s budget. But the landscape of post-secondary finance in Ontario is shifting dramatically following sweeping changes introduced by the province’s Liberal government. These changes affect OSAP, tuition billing, and the formula the province uses to assign funding to post-secondary institutions. One of these changes is the new “net tuition” policy, which Guelph piloted this year alongside a number of other schools. The policy aims to reduce “sticker shock” by subtracting the grants and scholarships each student is likely to receive from the expected cost of their tuition. An infographic released by the Council of Ontario Universities in September of 2016 puts it like this: if the average tuition for arts and sciences students in 2016 is around $6,000, and the average financial aid each student receives is around $4,000, then the “real cost” of tuition is only $2,000. It’s not that the cost of university is going down, or that anything else about the way students pay tuition is changing. It’s just that the sticker price of tuition will now reflect this “real cost,” as opposed to the full cost.
Starting this year, students will see this net tuition amount in the OSAP portal, and in a letter that the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development will send out in March or April. The new policy is meant to reflect the fact,
trumpeted by the government in the last few years, that students from families making less than $50,000 a year now receive non-repayable funding equal to or greater than the amount of tuition they need to pay. In other words, for many Ontario students tuition is effectively, if not actually, free. In order for the government to calculate net tuition numbers, universities need to set tuition rates much earlier than they used to. In fact, the U of G was supposed to submit its 2018-2019 increases alongside its 2017-2018 rates, but it didn’t. “We had thought we could use [2017-2018’s] tuition as an estimate, but the government asked for actual tuition,” said Brenda Whiteside, the associate vicepresident of student affairs, in an email to The Ontarion. “There were other universities in the same position.” Rebecca Cheskes, vice-president academic of the Central Student Association (CSA), put it in plainer terms: “The message I heard [from the administration] was, ‘We screwed up, and now we just have to do this, and we’re sorry.’”
What the administration had to do was make a decision about 2018-2019 tuition hikes, and make it fast.
The challenges of consultation If students don’t remember being consulted about those hikes, that’s because they weren’t. The University of Guelph decided to rollover
domestic tuition rate hikes from last year. Tuition for the average domestic undergrad in the arts and sciences, for instance, will increase three per cent, or about $200, from $6,571 to $6,768, according to the University’s budget development webpage. This is the maximum allowed by the province. In a video posted to the Student Affairs YouTube channel, which has a grand total of almost 20 views at the time of writing, associate vice-president academic Serge Desmarais explains why the University felt comfortable setting these rates without student consultation. “Last year we … had significant consultation with the academic community and with student groups regarding the setting of tuition … And because of the extent of the conversation that took place, we decided that … the best approach … was to simply roll over the domestic tuition,” says Desmarais in the video. In an email, Whiteside explained that the consultation Desmarais was referring to was through the Student Budget Committee, which met every two weeks and eventually presented a report to the Finance Committee and the Board of Governors. The CSA disagreed with the University’s decision, but appreciated the tough spot they were in. “There should be discussion and consultation every time those decisions are being made,” said Cheskes. “I don’t think it’s ever okay to just do a rollover, but we as a CSA understood that they didn’t have another choice.” The administration made at least somewhat of an effort to connect with students before finalizing the decision. Three days before the proposed tuition hikes went to the Board of Governors in late October, U of G Provost Charlotte Yates hosted a town hall to discuss the proposal. They announced that town hall in an email to student leaders only days in advance. “If I host a Halloween party and I tell people three